Alessandro Vespignani is Sternberg Family Distinguished University professor at the Northeastern University in Boston. He is the founding director of the Network Science Institute and leads the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems. In May 2017 he became member of the External Faculty of CSH.

Alessandro’s research interest is the interdisciplinary application of statistical and numerical simulation methods to study biological, social and technological networks. His recent work focuses on modeling the spatial spread of epidemics, including the realistic and data-driven computational modeling of emerging infectious diseases; the resilience of complex networks; and the collective behavior of techno-social systems.

He serves on the editorial board of several journals and is editor-in-chief of EPJ Data Science. He is member of the scientific advisory board of the Scientific Interchange Foundation in Turin, elected member of the Academy of Europe, Fellow of the American Physical Society and fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University.